Recipes and news from the makers of Zest Recipe Manager

I’m very excited to announce that Zest has reached another major milestone: 3.0! The headline feature in this release is support for ingredient shopping lists. All Zest Cloud subscribers can now create a shopping list from the ingredients of any recipe. Zest will group your ingredients by aisle and let you check them off as you shop. If you create multiple recipe lists you can also see a single combined view where matching ingredients are aggregated into one item:

All lists sync with Zest Cloud to all of your devices, so you can get organised on your iPad then take your iPhone to the grocery store!

Zest 3.0 is available for free for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch now on the App Store. Note, though, that only cloud subscribers are able to use the new shopping list feature! To learn more about Zest you can also visit our website.

Another release of Zest Recipe Manager, and another big step forward: Zest is now available for iPhone and iPod Touch! We know a lot of users have been waiting for this: now you can have your recipe collection in your pocket at all times. This portability brings a compelling new reason to sign up for Zest Cloud: you can now collect and manage your recipes on your iPad and sync them via the cloud to your phone so you have your ingredients lists handy when grocery shopping! Did you know you can check off your ingredients as you go just by tapping on them?

Or perhaps you don’t have an iPad at all, and this is your first chance to try Zest. We’ve trimmed down and redesigned the UI to work on the smaller phone screen. You can import, organise and edit your recipes just like the iPad version. Cooking mode doesn’t really make sense on the phone, so instead we redesigned the recipe view to accommodate this case via smarter scrolling. All the while we’ve kept those stunning food photos front and centre as your main inspiration!

Why not download Zest for free from the App Store today and give it a try?

We’re excited to announce the release of Zest Recipe Manager 2.0, which introduces the new Zest Cloud service! Zest Cloud is an optional subscription-based service that allows you to store your recipes in an online account. You can link multiple devices to the account so you can access your recipe collection from all of those devices. Online storage also acts as a backup to help keep your recipe collection safe.

Here and Beyond

Existing Zest users may have noticed the premium feature survey we offered in the 1.x release series. Results of that survey — and we thank everyone who participated — came out strongly in favour of two features:

Cloud Storage; and

Shopping Lists.

We’ve listened to your feedback and introduced Zest Cloud right now, and plan to introduce shopping lists in the near future. We’re also working on expanding device support, firstly to iPhone (and iPod Touch) but then also to Android devices. Beyond that there are more popular features from the survey to fill out, e.g. ingredient scaling and unit conversions. The future is exciting, please join us for the ride!

Here’s an early Christmas present for you: a new release of Zest Recipe Manager!

The headline feature for this release is improved sharing via email. Sharing recipes with your friends couldn’t be simpler: all they need is an email address. There’s no need to sign up for anything, nor does your friend need any special software. All the important recipe details are included in the email body:

Once your friends see your recipes, though, they may be tempted to try Zest! And if they do they’ll be able to import shared recipes into their own collection by opening the archive attached to each recipe email. Invite your food-loving friends to install Zest so you can swap recipes both ways! We’ve even made this simple with a new “Invite Friends” feature:

On top of these new features, we’ve been working hard on improving recipe importing to make it smarter and compatible with more sites. A big thanks to all users that have requested sites, your feedback has been the driving force behind these improvements, which include:

Exciting times: I’m thrilled to announce the initial release of our iPad app Zest Recipe Manager! This is the culmination of months of effort, bringing together a love of cooking (which inspires this blog) with our software development skills.

Zest is free, and allows you to collect, organise and cook your favourite recipes. If you have an iPad and find yourself searching for recipes on blogs like ours or larger sites like Taste.com.au you should definitely give Zest a try! Use the built-in browser to import your favourite recipes, then open cooking mode and Zest will guide you through step-by-step. Once you’ve cooked something, you can add your own photos and notes to the recipe to really start to personalise your collection. You can even make changes to recipes or add your own originals! Check out our main website to install or just get a taste of Zest:

Being lovers of food and recipe blogging, we’ve focused Zest around two key ideals:

The ability to import recipes from all around the web. Too many apps constrain you in a walled garden. We love to find recipes from anywhere: not just mainstream sites but niche blogs like this one! If you’re like-minded you’ll appreciate that Zest can import from any site1.

Food should be the centrepiece of any cookbook, including digital ones. Zest puts beautiful food photography front-and-centre, within minimal and clean interface. Let the photos inspire you, and add your own photos for your creations!

This is just the start for Zest: we have a lot of exciting plans for the future. If you’d like to participate more you can complete the “Zest Premium” survey in the app to let us know what direction you’d like to see us heading!

1 You may need to lend it a hand if the site does not use standard markup.